The consuming public is exposed to numerous marketing campaigns attempting to convey information to them. The most obvious attempt involves mass media advertising. However, important information is also conveyed through the design of products and packages, the design of store or purchase settings, the type of distribution channel used, and even through pricing practices.
Some campaigns are very successful and others are often failures. Two major factors distinguish these campaigns from one another: (1) how well a company understands its customers, and (2) how well it uses this understanding in making key decisions about advertising, product features, and other marketing variables.
The creation of satisfied customers is a function of a company's competence in both factors.
It is well established that most communication occurs nonverbally (Weisner, 1988; Knapp, 1981; Seiter, 1987). Thus customers "say" and "hear" a great deal more through nonverbal rather than verbal means of communication. However, virtually all market research tools rely on verbal means of communication such as questionnaires, telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews and discussions or focus groups.
Because companies rely so much on verbally oriented research tools they often miss much of what customers "say" and "hear" nonverbally. Thus companies often miss important opportunities to understand customers better and to communicate better with them. As a consequence, customers and the companies serving them become less well off.
The use of photographs as a social science research tool has also been growing. A few customer behavior researchers have begun using photographs as a way to document important possessions and their meaning to customers. Such techniques provide further insight into the thought process of customers thereby giving researchers a better idea of how a customer perceives the images that would appear in marketing campaigns.
Graphical means for analyzing networks is also known. In the area of social network analysis, computer packages exist to give a visual presentation to relationships in society. (Sage Publications, 1991; Knoke, 1990). These tools, while used for analysis of social relationships have not been applied to evaluation and relationships among factors in a commercial/marketing setting.
The present invention entitled the Metaphor Elicitation Technique utilizes these various research techniques to create a visually and other sensory oriented method and apparatus for creating research for marketing campaigns or to validate the thrust of an existing marketing campaign to determine if it accomplishes its stated purpose.